Oracle Blog

Blog for Raghuram

Tuesday Aug 20, 2013

Until now OVM Server for SPARC Direct I/O and SR-IOV features were limited to PCIe buses assigned to the primary domain only. This restriction is now removed with the release of OVM Server for SPARC 3.1. That is, now you can assign a PCIe bus to a logical domain and then assign PCIe slots or SR-IOV Virtual Functions from that PCIe bus to other domains. This opens up many different creative opportunities. For example it enables configuration such as below:

A config like the above along with Dynamic SR-IOV feature in OVM Server for SPARC 3.1 would open up various opportunities for deployment. Note this won't increase the availability of the I/O domains yet, but certainly in the near future. It certainly provides opportunity to handle situations manually like rebooting a Root domain. To reboot one of the Root domains, an admin can now remove VFs from I/O domains and then reboot that Root domain, and once the Root domain is rebooted, you can add those VFs back to the I/O domains again. The Solaris OS in I/O domains will automatically add those VFs(need to assign the same exact VFs) back to the same multi-path groups automatically there by everything back to normal.